Lexee gives devs a new Siri-like tool for apps

Mobile developers and businesses are increasingly getting the tools to embed Siri-like personal assistants into their mobile apps. Following the launch earlier this month of Nuance’s Nina (s nuan), Angel, an interactive voice response provider is releasing its own mobile SDK for iOS (s aapl) and Android (s goog) called Lexee, which will enable developers to voice-enable their apps.

Lexee actually builds off Nuance’s technology for online speech recognition and speech to text, so it’s similar in actual performance. The system is designed to help users accomplish tasks and interact using conversational speech. But Angel believes Lexee can stand out because of the ease with which developers can create their conversation flows and the analytical data that they can get back from Lexee.

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Lexee uses a simple point-and-click system called SiteBuilder, a toolkit that Angel first developed for IVR and call center applications. It allows non-developers to easily apply voice to any customer interaction. Lexee will also rely on Angel’s analytics, so developers will get back information on how consumers are interacting with Lexee and where any problems might arise in conversation flows.

Angel President Dave Rennyson said neither Nina nor AT&T’s Watson (s t), which also has its own SDK, provides that mix of ease of use and reporting. He said Lexee was used to voice-enable a Salesforce.com application in just four days. Angel, a division of MicroStrategy, currently has about 1,000 enterprise customers using its existing customer experience management tools including Best Buy (s bby), Pfizer, Barnes & Noble (s bks) and Facebook (s fb). He said those companies could be interested in re-using some of their work and applying Lexee to their mobile applications.

Lexee is just another sign of how our future will be filled with voice-enabled personal assistants. Siri has opened a lot of people’s eyes as to how speech can be used to get at complex tasks and can be combined with other tools to make us a lot more efficient.